Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)

Get out your
red/blue glasses and
check out this awesome stereo view of another world.
The scene was recorded
by Apollo 17 mission commander
Eugene Cernan on December 11, 1972,
one orbit before descending to land on the Moon.

Not all roses are red
of course,
but they can still be very pretty.
Likewise, the beautiful
Rosette
Nebula and other star forming regions are often shown in
astronomical images with a predominately red hue,
in part because the dominant emission in the nebula is
from hydrogen atoms.

Jupiter looks a bit different in infrared light.
To better understand
Jupiter's cloud motions and to help NASA's robotic
Juno spacecraft understand the
Hubble Space Telescope is being directed to
regularly image the entire Jovian giant.

What's happened to top of the Sun?
Last week, parts of Earth's southern hemisphere were treated to a
partial solar eclipse, where the
Moon blocks out part of the
Sun.
The featured image was taken toward the end of the eclipse from the coast of
Uruguay overlooking
Argentina's
Buenos Aires.

How did we get here?
We know that we live on a planet orbiting a star orbiting a galaxy, but how did all
of this form?
To understand details better, astrophysicists upgraded the famous
Illustris
Simulation into
IllustrisTNG --
now the most sophisticated computer model of
how galaxies evolved in our universe.

City lights shine along the upper east side of Manahattan in
this dramatic urban night skyscape from February 13.
Composed from a series of digital exposures, the monochrome
image is reminiscent of the time
when sensitive black and white film was a popular choice for dimly
lit night and astro-photography.

The comet PanSTARRS, also known as
the blue comet (C/2016 R2),
really is near the lower left edge of this stunning, wide field view
recorded on January 13.
Spanning nearly 20 degrees on the sky,
the
cosmic landscape is explored by well-exposed and processed frames
from a sensitive digital camera.

One of our Solar System's most tantalizing
worlds, Enceladus is backlit by the Sun in this
Cassini spacecraft image
from November 1, 2009.
The dramatic illumination reveals the plumes that
continuously spew into space from the south pole of
Saturn's 500 kilometer diameter moon.

What's that inside the Heart Nebula?
First, the large emission nebula dubbed
IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart.
It's shape perhaps fitting of the
Valentine's Day,
this heart glows brightly in red light
emitted by its most prominent element:
hydrogen.